At 7.30pm I was back at the station with some slight rain coming down, and snacks in hand ready to board my train to Astrakhan overnight.

I’d booked a seating class ticket and briefly panicked when I saw what appeared to be several drunken army soldiers waiting for the train, but they seemed to be in a different wagon. I boarded and was quite pleased with getting two seats again and the carriage being only a third full. It was going to be about 11 hours, so this was fine.

As we pulled out of the station I saw up on the hill the angel statue that I’d been searching for. It was pretty big and impressive, and quite the symbol for the city. The train pulls over the Volga river to the east side, and then follows the tracks south to Astrakhan.

After a while some of the soldiers came into our carriage and were being rather loud and drunken, with a few of them taking a look at what I was doing on my laptop and sitting behind me I decided it was time to pack it away. They then started causing a bit of a scene with a passenger at the back, before our wagon’s providnitsa came along and chased the lot of them out, and I ended up sleeping pretty much through until the morning.

Next thing I knew we were pulling in to Astrakhan, my final city in this leg of my Russian trip…

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